Electronic Book Review - eco-criticalhttp://electronicbookreview.com/tags/eco-critical
enThe Maypole is the Medium: A Review of The Networked Wilderness by Matt Cohenhttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/wild
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Madeleine Monson-Rosen</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2011-10-24</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>In a discussion of Claude Shannon’s mathematical theory of information, N. Katherine Hayles writes,</p>
<p><span class="longQuotation">The theory makes a strong distinction between message and signal. Lacan to the contrary, a message does not always arrive at its destination. In information theoretic terms, no message is ever sent. What is sent is a signal. Only when the message is encoded as a signal for transmission through a medium—for example, when ink is printed on paper or when electrical pulses are sent racing along telegraph wires—does it assume material form. (18)</span></p>
<p>It’s hard enough, for most literary scholars, to think about print and type in the abstract terms of medium and information. Matt Cohen’s <span class="booktitle">The Networked Wilderness</span> argues that we should take Shannon’s theoretic abstraction even further, expanding the categories of medium and message to encompass actions and events well outside the realm of conventional literary scholarship. This study argues that wars, medicine, and jokes are all encoded as signals upon the media conferred by the seventeenth-century American landscape. Substituting the term “publication event” for publications, Cohen’s book applies methodologies derived from the fields of information theory, print culture, and media studies to the actions and events that characterized relations between English colonists and Native Americans in the period leading up to the Pequot war of 1634-1638.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">The Networked Wilderness</span> begins its project, in fact a relatively constrained analysis of texts and events that emerge from colonial New England in the 1630s, by both proclaiming a field-transforming rejection of the divide between oral and literate cultures and by close-reading an often-cited, often-read event: Thomas Morton’s erection of the Maypole at Ma-Re Mount. Cohen suggests that conventional notions of print literacy operate with a far-too-narrow definition. Written and printed texts convey meaning even to those who cannot read them, and the techniques of textual analysis can be applied to a wide range of objects, including clothing, buildings, and the bodies of individual persons, on whom the actions of other individuals can be wrought. Implicit in Cohen’s claim is the assumption that literary analysis is itself already information theory, and therefore it offers a technique for analyzing “publication events” with a much broader purview than written and printed words. Cohen argues that there is no such thing as illiteracy, and that texts often communicate to those who cannot read them.</p>
<p>Thomas Morton’s maypole offers a case study of the way in which texts and events can signify without requiring conventional print literacy. “Let us think of the Maypole as a publishing venue,” Cohen writes:</p>
<p><span class="longQuotation">Morton himself refers to it as a kind of beacon for traders, but if we see it as a sophisticated communications tool, with poems tacked on for communal reading in a public place, it assumes a different significance. Fourteen years before the first printing press was established in Cambridge, Massachusetts Bay, Morton built a tool for distributing information publicly—and for creating a space of authority for oral proclamations as well—that competed with the Pilgrim leaders’ control over local oral and written exchanges.” (33)</span></p>
<p>Morton’s Maypole is, among all its other significances, a threat to Puritan hegemony in the sphere of communication. What Cohen denotes as a “publication event,” the erection of the Maypole and the affixing to it of Morton’s own “allegorical poems, presented as riddles or ciphers” (33), also functions, in this context, as a “homograph.” A homograph, as coined by Lee Edelman and expanded in Cohen’s usage,</p>
<p><span class="longQuotation">applies to either a material object (such as a Maypole) or an aggregation of gestures that require such a material context (the Maypole ritual, the ceremonial reading of poems from a sheet of paper). Such objects or gestures must also be recognized as the center of temporary apparent agreement about “meaning” regardless of the actual diversity of interpretations among observers. (43)</span></p>
<p>The Maypole functions as a homograph because, in addition to its symbolic association with England’s pagan history, the pole also has significance for the Native American groups with whom Morton was in contact. “The village-central poles that appear in many east coast Native archaeological sites and in some other European reports form the most obvious homograph with the Maypole” (43). Morton was not only setting himself and his community dead against his Puritan fellow-colonists, he was also engaging in “purposeful cultural brokering” (43).</p>
<p>Events as disparate as the erection of the Maypole by Morton, Edward Winslow’s curing of Massassoit’s constipation, and the Pequots’ terrifying battle practices, which included unearthly howling to frighten the colonists and dressing in the clothes of Europeans whom they had killed in order to terrorize their Puritan antagonists, form the “texts,” the homographic publication events that signify to both European and Native audiences.</p>
<p>In reading such publication events, events in which “texts” are “read,” Cohen turns print culture’s dependence on reading paper and ink on its head. On the one hand, Cohen’s project attempts, successfully for this reviewer, to wholly call into question an oral/literate divide that persists in anthropological accounts of the interactions of cultures possessing technologies of print and writing with those that don’t. On the other hand, Cohen’s work close-reads the texts (paper-and-ink texts), and the lives of the texts, that constitute the archive of encounters between English colonists and New England native populations in the 1630s. Such publication events as the Maypole or the terrorizing of the colonists by the Pequot can only be approached through their textual archive, but Cohen demonstrates that their signification extends far beyond their imagined readers. In this sense, Cohen’s study has the potential to reorient the field of print culture, and to reconfigure the intersections between literary studies and network science.</p>
<p>In reorganizing the conventional categories of medium and message (increasingly when investigating accounts of Native life in New England, persons, features of the landscape, even imitated animal noises, function as media, while the message might be medical information, or a joke), Cohen presents a profound claim, reconfiguring the persistent opposition between literate and oral communication. As that opposition is conventionally constructed, print cultures produce a reliable archive, engage in contracted proprietary exchange, and possess the capacity for reliable communication. Cohen argues that we ought to consider the erection of the Maypole and the curing of Massassoit as exercises in systematic “oral” communication networks as much as they are events to which our access comes through a print archive. He also argues that we must consider Native signifying systems such as wampum, an international currency used throughout New England before and after colonization, as “printed,” at least in the sense of being fixed and stable, forms of communication.</p>
<p>The stated goal of <span class="booktitle">The Networked Wilderness</span> is “to break down the separation of indigenous studies from the history of the book. To do so means engaging the implications of dissolving orality and literacy into a continuous topography or spectrum rather than thinking about them as a series of overlapping but always distinct cognitive categories or habits” (25). While the objects of analysis in Cohen’s book are relatively specific, the methodology outlined in the book’s introduction has the potential for widespread effects in the field of print culture and literary history. <span class="booktitle">The Networked Wilderness</span> proposes the rejection of illiteracy as a category, both in general and in particular as an oppositional term, arguing, instead, that so-called “illiterate” cultures and persons utilize a multimedia literacy. This multimedia literacy informs a methodology that recognizes that books often speak to the unlettered, and that “oral” or illiterate societies nonetheless have elaborate, systematic, and reliable forms of communicating and recording information. The radical expansion of the scope of communication theory in this book’s extraordinary introduction makes an invaluable contribution to the study of the history of communication.</p>
<p>What is unfortunate about <span class="booktitle">The Networked Wilderness</span> is that its impressive methodology does relatively little to illuminate the communication <span class="lightEmphasis">networks</span> in early New England, although it does confer an enhanced close reading strategy for both texts and events in the region and in the colonial mother countries in the 1630s. The study of networks per se is limited to a few instances, such as Massassoit’s cure, which includes a joke that takes almost twenty years to tell and depends on the expediency of Algonquian long-distance communication, especially as compared to the colonists’ limited communications capacity.</p>
<p>Not only is Edward Winslow’s cure a publication event in the sense that it earns him, and by extension his fellow inhabitants of Plymouth colony, a privileged relationship with Massassoit’s Wampanoag people, something that a formal treaty or contract could not do between such apparently disparate cultures, it is profoundly significant in that the curing of Massassoit’s body, the body of a king, becomes a metonym for the ideal relationship between the two groups: Native and English. When Winslow heals Massassoit, he also heals the Wampanoag society, in danger of dissolution or coup d’etat during his illness. This act seals a sort of compact of cooperation between the two groups. The cure signifies in the way a treaty cannot because, in a methodology characterized by opposition between literacy and illiteracy, written communication and contract is in effect a kind of protection racket, in which European theories of property relations produce the need for agreement in the first place, and then locate all the power for enforcing (or for that matter reneging on) the contract in the European colonists themselves. Part of what Cohen is asking us to see is a degree of agency on the part of Native Americans even in the middle of the process of aggressive (such as violent attacks) as well as passive (such as contagion) damage to them by Europeans.</p>
<p>In memory of Winslow’s cure of him, and the false reports of his death that preceded it, Massassoit orchestrates a practical joke on the inhabitants of Plymouth on the anniversary of the cure. According to John Winthrop’s diary, Winslow was traveling home to Plymouth in the company of a Wampanoag “olde Allye” Osamekin. “But before they took their Iornye Osamekin sent one of his men to Plim: to tell them that mr winslowe was dead, &amp; directed him to shewe how and where he was killed: whereupon there was much fear and sorrowe at Plim.” Of this dubious joke, Cohen writes,</p>
<p><span class="longQuotation">As Mark Twain might point out, premature reporting of mortality is one of the oldest ones in the book. But the deliberate deception has a complex relationship to the past. Reversing the roles at the crisis of Sowams eleven years earlier, Massassoit sends deliberate misinformation to the Plymouth colony. The news of his own death having been exaggerated, he reenacts and reverses the confusion of Winslow’s midnight trip through the woods. He then augments the misinformation in answer to the naïve question about his motives. Massassoit mocks the English notion of culture itself—a warning that still resonates as we try to read this incident today—by claiming that such deliberate misinformation is a Wampanoag trait or ritual. It is a many-edged joke, even leaving aside the amusement the recorder Winthrop clearly enjoys…. Where would the colony be without Winslow? asks Massassoit implicitly. (89)</span></p>
<p>This use of information and misinformation to effect a desired outcome informs Cohen’s most persuasive chapter. In an analysis of the publication event of the cure and its subsequent references, Cohen depicts the “wilderness” of New England as truly networked. Winslow’s cure and the later joke at his expense work because the Algonquians (including the Wampanoag, the Pequot, the Narragansett, and numerous other North American tribes) had an extensive, efficient, and well regulated system of communication.</p>
<p><span class="longQuotation">“When meeting of any in travell” [Roger] Williams reports, Algonquians would “strike fire either with stones or sticks, to take Tobacco, and discourse a little together.” By this means, each exchange between messengers became a node in a web of news sharing that could, with even a small number of “discourses,” swiftly distribute news over a widespread area and, in many cases, across political boundaries. Williams notes that the Narragansetts seldom traveled alone, which increased the likelihood of both the message’s transmission (in the event of attack or accident) and, under normal circumstances, of its fidelity. Not all news was intended for broadcast; Bradford and Winslow both report of “secret” communications frustrating their search for political agreements with local leaders. Such transmissions were governed by a different set of protocols. (71-72)</span></p>
<p>Were this passage more representative of its analysis, <span class="booktitle">The Networked Wilderness</span> would offer an exciting new instantiation of the theory of networks, a fact of social organization first identified in the 1960s, and an increasingly common way of describing social organization. Although made culturally current by the ubiquity of social media, social networks are themselves typically mapped by the spread of information (as well as pathogens such as flu viruses). Social scientists use the vectors of, for instance, conspiracy theories, in order to identify loosely organized social networks. The spread of information reveals links between persons without any evident social connection. In observing that the Algonquian peoples utilized extensive communication networks, Cohen sets the stage for what initially promises to be an important contribution to the study of social networks, connected, as they always are, by technologies of communication, whether individuals traveling in pairs or message blocks routed through fiber optic cable. Unfortunately, <span class="booktitle">The Networked Wilderness</span> does not fully deliver on this promise. While there is no shortage of significant and signifying publication events, the analysis of the networks that communicate those events falls short. The concluding chapter, on a Pequot publication event of the postmodern age, applies literary critical methodologies to a complex work of representation, but leaves aside any discussion of the networks, in early or postmodern New England, that communicate the significance of that work.</p>
<p>One of the final “texts” discussed in Cohen’s analysis is the Pequot Museum dedicated to the Fort Mystic Massacre of 1637. The Museum’s multimedia exhibits include simulation, of sights, sounds, and smells, as well as simulacra, such as mannequins representing Pequot men, women, and children, in order to restage the events of the Mystic Massacre, a decisive event of the Pequot war. Cohen proposes to read the museum “as a source equivalent in importance to the seventeenth-century published narratives of Captain John Underhill, one of the leaders of the attack, or the Reverend Philip Vincent, who was not present for it,” but who wrote and published an account of the attack (134). In reading the museum and the massacre it commemorates as multimedia representations of the same event, Cohen suggests that what might appear a “postmodern” use of simulation and simulacra in the museum in the 21st century might also be a re-mobilization of a Pequot practice of utilizing simulation and simulacra in the service of communication:</p>
<p><span class="longQuotation">Perhaps the most disturbing Native simulation—more than the storytelling, the camouflage, or the howling—was the wearing of clothes taken from slain English people. After the Wethersfield attack, the Pequots had rigged English clothes as sails symbolically in their canoes, a macabre mockery of English seagoing technology. (152)</span></p>
<p>Cohen suggests that the Pequot museum’s use of simulacra and simulation might not, in fact, be an effort at representing Pequot lifeways and might instead be a revival of that “macabre mockery”: “a deliberate use of simulacra designed to unsettle visitors” (139).</p>
<p>Cohen concludes <span class="booktitle">The Networked Wilderness</span> by relating fables of the cooptation of media. Like the simulacra and simulation used by the Pequots to terrorize the English settlers, modern simulations resist the cultural imperialism that originates in the interactions marked by the book’s publication events. Taking a page from Roger Williams, the founder of Rhode Island and proponent of religious freedom, Cohen argues,</p>
<p><span class="longQuotation">Planned interactions between cultures that might result in territorial or economic change must be entered into with ontologies of law and history suspended, but they should also be subject to consensually devised rules, mutual respect, and extraordinary patience. It is the constitution of consent—a social relation designed as a fulcrum to mutual advantage—that is the technology of justice. (174)</span></p>
<p>This model social relation, the “constitution of consent,” is exemplified by Morton’s Maypole and Massassoit’s cure as well as his joke. Contemporary Onondaga artist Gail Tremblay’s work, <span class="booktitle">Strawberry and Chocolate</span> also represents such an ideal relation. <span class="booktitle">Strawberry and Chocolate</span> is a traditional basket woven not from ash splints but from strips of celluloid (175). Repurposing the medium of film in order to communicate something both critical and complicit, both instrumental and useless, both European and Native American, <span class="booktitle">Strawberry and Chocolate</span> is, for Cohen, the signal that communicates the message of justice to both white and Native audiences.</p>
<p>But what, then, of the networked wilderness? Although Cohen successfully proposes multiple messages to be interpreted according to methodologies developed by scholars of print culture and the history of the book, he leaves the media that convey those messages, and that form the links (known also as edges in network theory) between the nodes (or vertices) of individuals, tribes, and colonies, relatively unmapped. As “the framework upon which distributed dynamical systems are built,” social networks remain relatively unstudied, especially historically (Newman et al 4). Cohen has done significant work towards interpreting the messages encoded and signaled across the communications networks of early New England. The networks themselves, however, have yet to be uncovered.</p>
<h3>Works Cited</h3>
<p>Hayles, N Katherine. <span class="booktitle">How We Became Posthuman</span>. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1999.</p>
<p>Newman, Mark, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, and Duncan J. Watts. <span class="booktitle">The Structure and Dynamics of Networks</span>. Princeton, NJ: Princeton U P, 2006.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/network-culture">network culture</a>, <a href="/tags/historiography">historiography</a>, <a href="/tags/media-history">media history</a>, <a href="/tags/eco-critical">eco-critical</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1384 at http://electronicbookreview.comFurther Notes From the Prison-House of Languagehttp://electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/technic
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Linda C Brigham</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2001-09-01</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>
I suppose I would call Mark Hansen’s<br /><span class="booktitle">Embodying Technesis</span><br />
a “working through” of some major threads in poststructuralism<br />
in order to rescue technology from enchantment. This description is<br />
mildly metaphorical; “working through” is a psychoanalytical phrase<br />
referring to the process of reclaiming traumatic material, by definition<br />
unrepresentable, for representation, thus restoring a coherent<br />
life-narrative to the trauma-sufferer. Although it smacks of Harold<br />
Bloom to see one’s philosophical and critical progenitors as<br />
“traumatic,” it makes common enough sense to see the mastery of theory<br />
as its translation into one’s own language from the alien language of<br />
others, and, subsequently, to see such translation as a way to put<br />
theory in its place - just as we put a traumatic event in its place when<br />
we work through trauma. This analogy is a little troubling, though,<br />
because it means that in the process of working through theory, Hansen<br />
would be doing to poststructuralism precisely what he claims<br />
poststructuralism does to technology: putting it into discourse,<br />
reducing its alterity to a signified other. In fact, Hansen’s term<br /><span class="emphasis">technesis</span><br />
means just that: the process of putting technology into<br />
discourse - reducing its “robust material exteriority” - one of the<br />
book’s refrains - to a ghostly negativity, a residue of the human, the<br />
cultural.
</p>
<p>But logical quibbling aside: the book, in its account of<br />
poststructuralism’s shortcomings with respect to technology, reads like<br />
a working-through. The book’s structure has a quest romance quality<br />
where each of the philosophical trajectories Hansen covers looms up to<br />
be defeated by the sword of technology ITSELF, that is, by an agent<br />
exterior to culture and cultural inscription. Science studies,<br />
deconstruction, psychoanalysis and (I know no appropriate label) Deleuze<br />
and Guattari all loom up, only to be beaten back, beaten down by a very<br />
similar series of strokes. The hero proves himself in trial with a<br />
serially returning repressed. For the reader, as for the psychoanalyst,<br />
the scene seems more repetitive than one suspects it is for the writer<br />
or the analysand; one cannot help but suspect that victory is not the<br />
only motive here - that there is some occult charge transferred in<br />
fingering over the adversary’s features - again and again - before the<br />
last goodbye.</p>
<p>
But I do not mean this as a dismissive criticism - in fact, I<br />
would hope the reader of this book (as well as this review) holds on to<br />
the end, for Hansen does sketch an alternative to technesis that<br />
presages an important program for rethinking “the problem of<br />
technology.” But getting there requires an extraordinary amount of fast<br />
travel. Hansen begins the book with a review and evaluation of recent<br />
cultural criticism focused on relations between technology and<br />
embodiment, a rocky road of various concrete scenes, theoretical<br />
approaches and historiographies, including Bruno Latour, N. Katherine<br />
Hayles,<br /><a class="internal" href="brighamopnece">Brigham wrote on How We<br />
Became Posthuman in the Spring of 1999</a><br />
Michelle Kendrick and a few others. The heterogeneity and<br />
richness of these theorists make the job of adequate summary nearly<br />
impossible - and the problem of summarizing plagues the whole volume<br />
because of its immense scope. On the whole, considering the task, Hansen<br />
does an impressive and intelligent work, given the impossibility of<br />
satisfaction, but the opening section, precisely because of the variety<br />
and specificity - the deliberate situatedness of the work of many of<br />
those he considers - is perhaps the roughest part of the book. So it is<br />
difficult, particularly here, to acquiesce to Hansen’s claim that all of<br />
these critics fall under the spell of language and overwrite, to a<br />
greater or lesser degree, the concrete alterity of technology. It is<br />
especially hard to see why that overwriting is important, given what<br />
these writers<br /><span class="emphasis">do</span><br />
offer.
</p>
<p>The path smoothes out somewhat in Part 2, where Hansen<br />
elaborates what he calls the “machine reduction” of technology, the<br />
shortcomings that undermine deconstruction’s supposed materiality.<br />
Derrida purportedly exposes the machinic nature of writing, the coreless<br />
core of the supposedly autonomous human agent. However, as Hansen<br />
argues, this antihumanist scandal is actually a way of domesticating the<br />
machine. Deconstruction inherits a reduction of technology stemming from<br />
Aristotle, a reduction that continues to form the backdrop for Western<br />
thought. Derrida, in exposing the machine as that which is disguised as<br />
the subordinated instrumentality of writing, depends for its effect on<br />
friction with the grain of Aristotle, and produces only a discursive<br />
machine, a reduction of the materiality of technology to text, an<br />
artificial agent. Postmodernity fares less well than modernism in this<br />
respect; although one would expect Heidegger, in his famously humanist<br />
“Question Concerning Technology,” to be a key target of Hansen’s charge<br />
of technological reduction, Derrida comes in for more criticism than<br />
Heidegger. Heidegger, says Hansen, is rather obviously defensive about<br />
technology, and his criticism of its alienating effects barely conceals<br />
acknowledgment of its potential as an exterior threat to authenticity -<br />
wherein technology has the status of an agent. Derrida, in effecting a<br />
supposed closure to Heideggerian metaphysics, in fact only develops<br />
another way to overwrite technology: by presenting it as textuality.<br />
Technology becomes a structuring negative, a gravitational center around<br />
which humanity and culture acquire their respective order. Likewise,<br />
Derrida subverts the promise of Paul de Man’s attempt to unwrite the<br />
overwriting of technology through the notion of allegory. While de Man<br />
critically disjoins memory and technology, Derrida, with his notion of<br />
artificial memory, memory as technology, brings them together once again<br />
- reducing technology’s exteriority and locating it under the skin.</p>
<p>Part Three, the last major section of critique, sweeps through<br />
Lacanian psychoanalysis and Deleuze and Guattari’s demolition of<br />
subjects into “desiring machines.” For Hansen, Lacan’s emphasis on the<br />
symbolic works very much like deconstruction’s emphasis on the machine<br />
quality of textuality. The Real, for Lacan, is not robust; rather it is<br />
always seen from the point of view of the symbolic, from the subject,<br />
and is assimilated to the world of the subject as the impossible object<br />
of desire. In contrast to the early Freud, whose<br />
quasi-neurophysiological theories of perception emphasized the<br />
unprocessed element of perception, Lacan (and Derrida) subvert<br />
exteriority into a disturbance of signification. Hansen turns to the<br />
work of Deleuze and Guattari with similar misgivings on these theorists’<br />
emphasis on desire. D+G, as he refers to them, have a more promising<br />
program than deconstruction or Lacanian psychoanalysis because of the<br />
antirepresentationalism and anti-subjectivism of their key concept of<br />
deterritorialization. They move towards conceptualizing a relation to<br />
exteriority as a kind of rhythmic flux that does not invoke<br />
signification. But the subject, and representation, lingers in the<br />
dependence of the notion of deterritorialization - along with nomadic<br />
science, along with “experience” - on their opposites, on<br />
reterritorialization, on the state, and on thought. The movement across<br />
and between these polarities becomes the subject of desire, and as in<br />
Lacan, desire becomes a defensive appropriation of the exteriority of<br />
technology.</p>
<p>
A book with such a tremendously ambitious philosophical and<br />
critical scope is bound to raise readers’ complaints about the short<br />
shrift their own favorite figures have received. Certainly aficionados<br />
of German media theory will be disturbed by Hansen’s dismissal of<br />
Friedrich Kittler (systems theory also gets a glib treatment) - and this<br />
is too bad, because these are readers who I imagine would be very<br />
interested in Hansen’s overall agenda. Tucked away in “Interlude 2,” the<br />
last stop before we arrive at Hansen’s recommendation for a solution to<br />
all these shortcomings, Hansen’s remarks on Kittler are both puzzling<br />
and unconvincing. He refers to Kittler’s treatment of the media that<br />
compose the “materialities of communication” as “background” to “our<br />
contemporary forms of knowledge production” (221), a formulation that<br />
makes Kittler sound like he is filling in the gaps of intellectual<br />
history. Yet Hansen acknowledges that Kittler, far more concretely than<br />
D+G, presents technology as having effects prior to and outside of<br />
subjectification, formative of sensory experience itself. However,<br />
paradoxically, Hansen takes this emphasis on technology as tending<br />
towards a disembodied antihumanism - for which his basis is Kittler’s<br />
enigmatic essay, “There is No Software.” Hansen doesn’t understand the<br />
essay (a fact that only sets him among the majority of its readers, this<br />
writer included); he seems to view it as a program for increasing<br />
hardware efficiency, when the essay actually underwrites a crucial<br />
distinction between programmability (which presumably includes hardware<br />
efficiency, unless you very specifically reorient what is generally<br />
meant by efficiency) and nonprogrammability, a distinction between<br />
Turing machines and other kinds of machines and humans.<br /><a class="internal" href="clarkece">Bruce Clarke writes about<br />
Friedrich Kittler’s Technosublime in the Winter 99/00 ebr</a>
</p>
<p>
Nonetheless, after these serial turnings, we at last arrive at<br />
an engaging “right way” with technology in the late work of Walter<br />
Benjamin. Fortunately, it is a real alternative to the thrust the book<br />
critiques. The later Benjamin - the last chapter riffs on “Some Motifs<br />
in Baudelaire” - does indeed counter the textual focus of deconstruction<br />
and Lacan’s symbolic - in that it offers no object at all - and<br />
therefore has no subject either. Hansen summarizes Benjamin’s<br />
revalidation of<br /><italics>Erlebnis</italics><br />
lived experience - a phrase properly understood oxymoronically.<br />
Living constitutes a continual simultaneity, an intersection of life<br />
with event, a Ballardian crash - while “experience” - as emphasized in<br /><italics>Erlebnis’s</italics><br />
opposite,<br /><italics>Erfahrung</italics><br />
- records, temporalizes, memorializes precisely those events<br />
that are not fully lived.<br /><italics>Erlebnis</italics><br />
“experiences” the other -including the technological other -<br />
through<br /><italics>mimesis</italics>, the registry of the other in the body rather than in<br />
representation. So film, as a mimetic rendering of its object, has a<br />
direct sensory appeal that undermines and precedes understanding, and in<br />
this respect it poses for Benjamin the potential of bypassing<br />
interiority and the linguistic alienation of self from self “the<br />
subject” constitutes - in the process putting an end to technesis.<br />
Benjamin’s essay also supports the elements of Freud Hansen favors, the<br />
physiological theorizing that depicts consciousness, especially<br />
consciousness in relation to shock experience, as prior to and exclusive<br />
of memory. Memory begins where consciousness ends.
</p>
<p>
Yet this approach is certainly not exclusively Benjamin’s -<br />
especially this view of mimesis. Judith Butler, as well as many other<br />
feminists and queer theorists, have questioned the preeminence of the<br />
symbolic in Lacan. Butler - along with Diana Fuss, Kaja Silverman,<br />
Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, and others - has suggested that an<br />
unsymbolically-mediated identification precedes subjectification, and<br />
continues to lurk beneath it. In fact, I think the connection of<br />
Hansen’s approach to Alice Jardine’s in<br /><span class="booktitle">Gynesis</span><br />
is far more substantial than he acknowledges, and resources from<br />
gender theory have the potential to massively enrich what Hansen is<br />
drawing from Benjamin. All in all, Hansen’s conclusion is both too<br />
specific and too fragmentary - another sign that he is working through<br />
his paternal adversaries in high (and male-dominated) theory rather than<br />
making a calculated argument for a new agenda. I would anticipate that<br />
Hansen’s next work will invoke a conceptual rather than an<br />
author-structured basis for making distinctions. One distinction offers<br />
itself immediately (so to speak): Hansen’s praise seems reserved for<br />
nonreflexive approaches to alterity - where reflexivity is the process<br />
of representing otherness in order to perform work on the<br />
representation, which mediates work on the world. While non- or<br />
anti-reflexivity is unlikely to offer a way, as Hansen suggests in the<br />
course of his comments on Bergson, “to restore solidarity between<br />
individual and collective life” (241), or at least one would hope not,<br />
it is nonetheless a crucial alternative experience to the massively<br />
overdeveloped reflexivity that now governs us, often through the<br />
distributed consciousnesses of actuarial tables and massively networked<br />
financial connectivity, leading to ever more disturbingly robust forms<br />
of social synchronization under global regimes of communication. Our<br />
great challenge is to awaken from a world where exteriority has no<br />
chance, where feedback is always already appropriated and redeployed by<br />
the system. This is not a new thought, but we are not done with it, and<br />
it is certainly at least as timely now as it ever was.
</p>
<p>
&gt;&gt;—&gt;<br /><a class="internal" href="hansenrip">Mark Hansen responds</a>.
</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/mark-hansen">mark hansen</a>, <a href="/tags/poststructuralism">poststructuralism</a>, <a href="/tags/harold-bloom">harold bloom</a>, <a href="/tags/deleuze">deleuze</a>, <a href="/tags/guattari">guattari</a>, <a href="/tags/derrida">derrida</a>, <a href="/tags/paul-de-man">paul de man</a>, <a href="/tags/friedrich-kittler">friedrich kittler</a>, <a href="/tags/ecology">ecology</a>, <a href="/tags/ecological-media-theory">ecological media theory</a>, <a href="/tags/systems-theory">systems theory</a>, <a href="/tags/ecocriticism">ecocriticism</a>, <a href="/tags/ecocritical">ecocritical</a>, <a href="/tags/eco-criticism">eco-criticism</a>, <a href="/tags/eco-critical">eco-critical</a>, <a href="/tags/software">software</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator713 at http://electronicbookreview.com